Darkest America

Black Minstrelsy From Slavery to Hip-Hop

(Norton; 364 pages; $26.95)

Every Halloween like clockwork, newspaper reports surface about blackface parties. Usually it is the doing of college students. Frat-boy shenanigans include greasepaint, 40s and pimp chalices. The public is alarmed and the guilty parties offer apologies with the hackneyed proclamation "I'm not a racist."

Less visibly, members of the African American community chime in and offer the observation that African American entertainers are at times guilty of perpetuating the same demeaning stereotypes, "cooning" and putting on "modern-day minstrel shows."

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Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen's "Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy From Slavery to Hip-Hop" traces the resilient strands of minstrelsy in American culture. Indeed, they suggest that minstrelsy is so enmeshed in our culture that there is no end in sight. These authors, however, are not primarily concerned with black-painted minstrels, but with black minstrels. To that end, they provide a historical account of how black audiences have enjoyed minstrel shows and minstrel-inspired entertainment for more than a century.

The book provides exciting and ample detail about elaborate, hodgepodge traveling productions that catered to both black and white audiences. Even when they performed before black crowds, their humor depended in significant measure on racist stereotypes.

The authors handily disabuse readers of the idea that black audiences have always rejected minstrelsy. Instead, they show how its forms were sustained in black entertainment over the 20th century. This sets up their convincing case for the popularity of reality shows and Tyler Perry comedies with African American audiences.

In one entertaining and well-paced chapter, they travel to New Orleans to encounter the Mardi Gras Zulus, who each year are adorned in blackface and bones, without backlash. Reaching back further, their discussion of late 19th, early 20th century black blackface comedic genius Bert Williams is rich in detail, although somewhat unconvincing in analysis, which reveals a deeper problem with the book.

The book suffers from the effort to fashion a clean narrative. The authors cast black people in two categories: those who were "respectable" and disliked minstrelsy, and those who felt free not to worry at all about it. Worse still, they draw these as simple class distinctions, where middle-class opprobrium is set against working-class freedom.

However, the authors note that the minstrel-show form was a motley entertainment, often with artistic genius embedded therein. We ought to expect ambivalence here. In fact, American media writ broadly has always been so rife with gender, racial and class stereotypes that one can hardly consume anything without begrudgingly accepting a limited vision of our humanity. Black people are no different in this.

Perhaps if the authors had taken on the fullness of that complexity, they could have deepened their account of black minstrelsy. Moreover, the almost complete absence of female performers from their analysis, and inchoate description of what minstrelsy actually is and isn't, blunts the complex subject matter even further.

The authors are well versed in the African American musical tradition. Therefore, their failure to interpret black minstrelsy in light of black aesthetic traditions is unfortunate. Had they considered the role of dramatic contrast, melodrama, ambiguity and nuanced expression in African American art, they might have understood that for black people, reactions to gifted "minstrels" had to be more complex than "yea" or "nay."

This unevenness between information and analysis persists throughout. Works they describe with care sometimes slide into tidy and alarming assessments. For example, the statement "Zora Neale Hurston thought Negroes were primitive" sits in the midst of an otherwise thoughtful discussion of her work and the way she drew on conventions of the minstrel stage.

The greatest disappointment, however, is that the book reads at times as though it were telling critics of minstrelsy to "lighten up and enjoy the fun." Reminiscent of Sut Jally and Justin Lewis' critical term "enlightened racism," it implies that as long as we "know" something is racist, we are free to knowingly enjoy it. My response: not so fast.

"Darkest America" only hints at something more profound that is at the core of its subject matter. That is: how we (all of us) attempt to reconcile the appeal of a certain ugliness of depiction by drowning it in laughter. Black Americans will never cease, it seems, to see themselves, in part, as they are seen, and that is a more complex affair than parsing out negative and positive images - just as all Americans find some comfort in the persistence of racial inequality through the consumption of stereotype.

That said, this book brings a conversation that exists among historians, performance-studies scholars and entertainers to a broader audience at a prescient time. Recent theatrical productions like "The Scottsboro Boys" and Will Power's "Fetch Clay, Make Man," about the friendship between Muhammad Ali and Stepin Fetchit, along with the antics of Lil Wayne and the casts of VH1 reality programming, reveal that in all sectors of society, minstrelsy stays on our minds as both delight and indictment.